The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Page 38

  The air of dissatisfaction grew. Nobody agreed any more, not even all those who had agreed to agree for the sake of the cause. Fights broke out like flash fires; some women were given to sulks and inexplicable silences, others to blows and helpless tears quickly forgotten. On advice from Sally, Sheena called a council to try and bring everybody together, but it got off on the wrong foot.

  Dr. Ora Fessenden said, “Are we going to sit around on our butts, or what?”

  Sheena said, “National opinion is running in our favor. We have to consolidate our gains.”

  Rap said, “Gains hell. What kind of war is this? Where are the scalps?”

  Sheena drew herself up. “We are not Amazons.”

  Rap said, “That’s a crock of shit,” and she and Dr. Ora Fessenden stamped out.

  “Rape,” Rap screamed, running from the far left to the far right and then making a complete circuit of the clearing. “Rape,” she shouted, taking careful note of who came running and who didn’t. “Raaaaaaaaape.”

  Dr. Ora Fessenden rushed to her side, the figure of outraged womanhood. They both watched until a suitable number of women had assembled and then she said, in stentorian tones, “We cannot let this go unavenged.”

  “My God,” Sheena said, looking at the blackened object in Rap’s hand. “What are you doing with that thing?”

  Blood-smeared and grinning, Rap said, “When you’re trying to make a point, you have to go ahead and make your point.” She thrust her trophy into Sheena’s face.

  Sheena averted her eyes quickly; she thought it was an ear. “That’s supposed to be a rhetorical point.”

  “Listen, baby, this world doesn’t give marks for good conduct.”

  Sheena stiffened. “You keep your girls in line or you’re finished.”

  Rap was smoldering; she pushed her face up to Sheena’s, saying, “You can’t do without us and you know it.”

  “If we have to, we’ll learn.”

  “Aieeee.” One of Rap’s cadre had taken the trophy from her and tied it on a string; now she ran through the camp swinging it around her head, and dozens of throats opened to echo her shout. “Aieeeeee.”

  Patsy and Andy were together in the bushes near the camp; proximity to danger made their pleasure more intense. Andy said, “Leave with me.”

  She said, “I can’t. I told you what they do to deserters.”

  “They’ll never catch us.”

  “You don’t know these women,” Patsy said. “Look, Andy, you’d better go.”

  “Just a minute more.” Andy buried his face in her hair. “Just a little minute more.”

  “Rape,” Rap shouted again, running through the clearing with her voice raised like a trumpet. “Raaaaaaaape.”

  Although she knew it was a mistake, Sally had sneaked away to see Zack and the children. The camp seemed strangely deserted, and nobody was there to sign out the Jeep she took. She had an uncanny intimation of trouble at a great distance, but she shook it off and drove to her house. She would have expected barricades and guards: state of war, but the streets were virtually empty and she reached her neighborhood without trouble.

  Zack and the children embraced her and wanted to know when she was coming home.

  “Soon, I think. They’re all frightened of us now.”

  Zack said, “I’m not so sure.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any resistance.”

  “Oh,” he said, “they’ve decided to let you have the town.”

  “What did I tell you?”

  “Sop,” he said. “You can have anything you want. Up to a point.”

  Sally was thinking of Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden. “What if we take more?”

  “Wipeout,” Zack said. “You’ll see.”

  “Oh Lord,” she said, vaulting into the Jeep. “Maybe it’ll be over sooner than I thought.”

  She was already too late. She saw the flames shooting skyward as she came out of the drive.

  “It’s Flowermont.”

  Because she had to make sure, she wrenched the Jeep in that direction and rode to the garden apartments; smoke filled the streets for blocks around.

  Looking at the devastation, Sally was reminded of Indian massacres in the movies of her childhood: the smoking ruins, the carnage, the moans of the single survivor who would bubble out his story in her arms. She could not be sure about the bodies: whether there were any, whether there were as many as she thought, but she was sure those were charred corpses in the rubble. Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden had devised a flag and hoisted it from a tree: the symbol of the women’s movement, altered to suit their mood—the crudely executed fist reduced to clenched bones and surrounded by flames. The single survivor died before he could bubble out his story in her arms.

  In the camp, Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden had a victory celebration around the fire. They had taken unspeakable trophies in their raid and could not understand why many of the women refused to wear them.

  Patsy and Andy, in the bushes, watched with growing alarm. Even from their safe distance, Andy was fairly sure he saw what he thought he saw and he whispered, “Look, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Not now,” Patsy said, pulling him closer. “Tonight. The patrols.”

  By now the little girls had been brought up from the day care compound and they had joined the dance, their fat cheeks smeared with blood. Rap’s women were in heated discussion with the Mothers’ Escadrille about the disposition of the boy children: would they be destroyed or reared as slaves? While they were talking, one of the mothers who had never felt at home in any faction sneaked down to the compound and freed the lot of them. Now she was running around in helpless tears, flapping her arms and sobbing broken messages, but no matter what she said to the children, she couldn’t seem to get any of them to flee.

  Sheena and her lieutenant, Margy, and Lory, her secretary, came out of the command shack at the same moment Sally arrived in camp; she rushed to join them, and together they extracted Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden from the dance for a meeting of the council.

  When they entered the shack, Ellen Ferguson hung up the phone in clattering haste and turned to confront them with a confusing mixture of expressions; Sally thought the foremost one was probably guilt.

  Sally waited until they were all silent and then said, “The place is surrounded. They let me through to bring the message. They have tanks.”

  Ellen Ferguson said, “They just delivered their ultimatum. Stop the raids and pull back to camp or they’ll have bombers level this place.”

  “Pull back, hell,” Rap said.

  Dr. Ora Fessenden shook a bloody fist. “We’ll show them.”

  “We’ll fight to the death.”

  Ellen said, quietly, “I already agreed.”

  Down at the main gate, Marva, who was on guard duty, leaned across the barbed wire to talk to the captain of the tank detail. She thought he was kind of cute.

  “Don’t anybody panic,” Rap was saying. “We can handle this thing. We can fight them off.”

  “We can fight them in the hedgerows,” Dr. Ora Fessenden said in rising tones. “We can fight them in the ditches, we can hit them with everything we’ve got …”

  “Not from here you can’t.”

  “We can burn and bomb and kill and … What did you say?”

  “I said, not from here.” Because they were all staring, Ellen Ferguson covered quickly, saying, “I mean, if I’m going to be of any value to the movement, I have to have this place in good condition.”

  Sheena said quietly, “That’s not what you mean.”

  Ellen was near tears. “All right, dammit. This place is all I have.”

  “My God,” Annie Chandler shrieked. “Rape.” She parted the bushes to reveal Patsy and Andy, who hugged each other in silence. “Rape,” Annie screamed, and everybody who could hear above the din came running. “Kill the bastard, rape, rape, rape.”

  Patsy rose to her feet and drew Andy up with her, shouting to make herself heard. “I said,
it isn’t rape.”

  Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden were advancing on Ellen Ferguson. “You’re not going to compromise us. We’ll kill you first.”

  “Oh,” Ellen said, backing away. “That’s another thing. They wanted the two of you. I had to promise we’d send you out.”

  The two women lunged, and then retreated, mute with fury. Ellen had produced a gun from her desk drawer and now she had them covered.

  “Son of a bitch,” Rap said. “Son of a bitch.”

  “Kill them.”

  “Burn them.”

  “Hurt them.”

  “Make an example of them.”

  “I love you, Patsy.”

  “Oh, Andy, I love you.”

  Sally said softly, “So it’s all over.”

  “Only parts of it,” Ellen said. “It will never really be over, as long as there are women left to fight. We’ll be better off without these two and their cannibals; we can retrench and make a new start.”

  “I guess this is as good a time as any.” Sheena got to her feet. “I might as well tell you, I’m splitting.”

  They turned to face her, Ellen being careful to keep the gun on Dr. Ora Fessenden and Rap.

  “You’re what?”

  “I can do a hell of a lot more good on my new show. Prime time, nightly, nationwide TV.”

  Rap snarled, “The hell you say.”

  “Look, Rap, I’ll interview you.”

  “Stuff it.”

  “Think what I can do for the movement. I can reach sixty million people, you’ll see.”

  Ellen Ferguson said, with some satisfaction, “That’s not really what you mean.”

  “Maybe it isn’t. It’s been you, you, you all this time.” Sheena picked up her clipboard, her notebooks and papers; Lory and Margy both moved as if to follow her but she rebuffed them with a single sweep of her arm. “Well, it’s high time I started thinking about me.”

  Outside, the women had raised a stake and now Patsy and Andy were lashed to it, standing back to back.

  In the shack, Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden had turned as one and advanced on Ellen Ferguson, pushing the gun aside.

  The good doctor said, “I knew you wouldn’t have the guts to shoot. You never had any guts.”

  Ellen cried out, “Sheena, help me.”

  But Sheena was already in the doorway, and she hesitated for only a moment, saying, “Listen, it’s sauve qui peut in this day and time, sweetie, and the sooner you realize it, the better.”

  Rap finished pushing Ellen down and took the gun. She stood over her victim for a minute, grinning. “In the battle of the sexes, there are only allies.” Then she put a bullet through Ellen’s favorite moose head so Ellen would have something to remember her by.

  The women had collected twigs and they were just about to set fire to Patsy and Andy when Sheena came out, closely followed by Dr. Ora Fessenden and a warlike Rap.

  Everybody started shouting at once and in the imbroglio that followed, Patsy and Andy escaped. They would surface years later in a small town in Minnesota, with an ecologically alarming number of children; they would both be able to pursue their chosen careers in the law because they worked hand in hand to take care of all the children and the house, and they would love each other until they died.

  Ellen Ferguson sat with her elbows on her knees and her head drooping, saying, “I can’t believe it’s all over, after I worked so hard, I gave so much …”

  Sally said, “It isn’t over. Remember what you said, as long as there are women, there will be a fight.”

  “But we’ve lost our leaders.”

  “You could …”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Don’t worry, there are plenty of others.”

  “As Sally spoke, the door opened and Glenda stepped in to take Sheena’s place.

  When the melee in the clearing was over, Dr. Ora Fessenden and Rap had escaped with their followers. They knew the lay of the land and so they were able to elude the troop concentration, which surrounded the camp, and began to lay plans to regroup and fight another day.

  A number of women, disgusted by the orgy of violence, chose to pack their things and go. The Mothers’ Escadrille deserted en masse, taking their children and a few children who didn’t even belong to them.

  Ellen said, “You’re going to have to go down there and parley. I’m not used to talking to men.”

  And so Sally found herself going down to the gate to conduct negotiations.

  She said, “The two you wanted got away. The rest of them—I mean us—are acting in good faith.” She lifted her chin. “If you want to go ahead and bomb anyway, you’ll have to go ahead and bomb.”

  The captain lifted her and set her on the hood of the Jeep. He was grinning. “Shit, little lady, we just wanted to throw a scare into you.”

  “You don’t understand.” She wanted to get down off the hood but he had propped his arms on either side of her. She knew she ought to be furious, but instead she kept thinking how much she missed Zack. Speaking with as much dignity as she could under the circumstances, she outlined the women’s complaints; she already knew it was hopeless to list them as demands.

  “Don’t you worry about a thing, honey.” He lifted her down and gave her a slap on the rump to speed her on her way. “Everything is going to be real different from now on.”

  “I bet.”

  Coming back up the hill to camp, she saw how sad everything looked, and she could not for the life of her decide whether it was because the women who had been gathered here had been inadequate in the cause or whether it was, rather, that the cause itself had been insufficiently identified; she suspected that they had come up against the human condition, failed to recognize it and so tried to attack a single part, which seemed to involve attacking the only allies they would ever have. As for the specific campaign, as far as she could tell, it was possible to change some of the surface or superficial details but once that was done things were still going to be more or less the way they were, and all the best will in the world would not make any real difference.

  In the clearing, Lory stood at Glenda’s elbow. “Of course you’re going to need a lieutenant.”

  Glenda said, “I guess so.”

  Ellen Ferguson was brooding over a row of birches that had been trashed during the struggle. If she could stake them back up in time, they might re-root.

  June said, “OK, I’m going to be mess sergeant.”

  Margy said, “The hell you will,” and pushed her in the face.

  Glenda said, thoughtfully, “Maybe we could mount a Lysistrata campaign.”

  Lory snorted. “If their wives won’t do it, there are plenty of girls who will.”

  Zack sent a message:

  WE HAVE TO HELP EACH OTHER.

  Sally sent back:

  I KNOW.

  Before she went home, Sally had to say goodbye to Ellen Ferguson.

  Ellen’s huge, homely face sagged. “Not you too.”

  Sally looked at the desultory groups policing the wreckage, at the separate councils convening in every corner. “I don’t know why I came. I guess I thought we could really do something.”

  Ellen made a half-turn, taking in the command shack, the compound, the women who remained. “Isn’t this enough?”

  “I have to get on with my life.”

  Ellen said, “This is mine.”

  “Oh, Vic, I’ve been so stupid.” June was sobbing in Vic’s arms. She was also lying in her teeth but she didn’t care, she was sick of the revolution and she was going to have to go through this formula before Vic would allow her to resume her place at his kitchen sink. The work was still boring and stupid but at least there was less of it than there had been at camp; her bed was softer, and since it was coming on winter, she was always grateful for the storm sashes, which Vic put up every November, and the warmth of the oil burner, which he took apart and cleaned with his own hands every fall.

  Sally found her house in good order, thanks to
Zack, but there were several weeks’ work piled up in her studio, and she had lost a couple of commissions. She opened her drawer to discover, with a smile, that Zack had washed at least one load of underwear with something red.

  “I think we do better together,” Zack said.

  Sally said, “We always have.”

  In the wake of fraternization with the military guard detail, Marva discovered she was pregnant. She knew what Dr. Ora Fessenden said she was supposed to do, but she didn’t think she wanted to.

  As weeks passed, the women continued to drift away. “It’s nice here and all,” Betts said apologetically, “but there’s a certain je ne sais quoi missing; I don’t know what it is, but I’m going back in there and see if I can find it.”

  Glenda said, “Yeah, well. So long as there is a yang, I guess there is going to have to be a yin.”

  “Don’t you mean, so long as there is a yin, there is going to have to be a yang?”

  Glenda looked in the general direction of town, knowing there was nothing there for her to go back to. “I don’t know what I mean any more.”

  Activity and numbers at the camp had decreased to the point where federal troops could be withdrawn. They were needed, as it turned out, to deal with wildcat raids in another part of the state. Those who had been on the scene came back with reports of incredible viciousness.

  Standing at their windows in the town, the women could look up to the hills and see the camp fire still burning, but as the months wore on, fewer and fewer of them looked and the column of smoke diminished in size because the remaining women were running out of volunteers whose turn it was to feed the fire.

  Now that it was over, things went on more or less as they had before.

  —Nova 4, 1974